by M C Scott
Trabo wasn’t watching the fight, although it took me some time to discover that. I was dressed as a tavern whore and working the room was necessarily a slow business; men to fend off, men to let down gently. I couldn’t afford to cause a riot and while I have no qualms about protecting my virtue by force if I have to, on that particular night I had to make sure it didn’t come to that.
When I had been through the entire room and failed to find him, I headed upstairs to the third floor, where were the better-smelling rooms with clean straw on the floor and fewer lice. The one in which I found him was surprisingly wholesome. The blanket on the bed was clean, after a fashion, and the walls had been newly whitewashed in the spring.
Trabo had eaten of their stew and had a flask of wine to hand. He was seated on the bed, writing a letter, when I entered.
‘Jocasta!’
His sword met me, face-high, as I stepped in through the door. He lowered it, but did not sheathe it. He was gaining wisdom, I think, or just so unsettled that he didn’t know whom he could trust any more. ‘What brings you here?’
‘I came to apologize.’ I pushed the door shut behind me, slid the bolts across. ‘May I sit?’
‘What? Yes, of course.’ He swept away the writing from the bed, set it neatly on the floor. That was Trabo all through; impetuous, but neat-minded. The combination had a lot to recommend it. ‘And wine? Would you like wine? I only have one beaker, but …’
‘We could share it?’
I sat on the edge of the bed. I had dressed in a rough tunic without adornment, and pinned my hair up with cheap bronze pins. I pulled them out and leaned forward to set them atop his letter, which let me scan the first lines.
To Geminus from Trabo, Greetings. I leave at first light on a horse Pantera has provided. He
I straightened, sat on the bed. Trabo looked as if I had just slapped him across the face. He was standing there with his sword in one hand and his beaker of wine in the other and didn’t know which to thrust forward first.
‘Geminus got to you through me,’ I said. ‘I’m so terribly sorry.’
‘You know about that?’ He was so relieved, it was heart-breaking. He leaned back against the wall – he almost fell on to it, really – and slid down until he was sitting on his heels with his hands laced around his knees. He looked more haggard than I’d ever seen him. More than when Pantera had a knife to his throat and he was within three breaths of dying.
Do I believe Pantera would have killed him back in Caenis’ cottage? Without question or hesitation, yes. Do you think Pantera doesn’t kill? He’s ruthless; he kills whoever gets in his way.
But now he had a use for Trabo, and Lucius had a use for him too, and poor Trabo was caught between, not knowing whether to serve both or neither, and terrified that one side or other was going to gouge out my eyes and rip out my tongue with hot irons in front of him if he made a mistake.
Wretchedness etched his every feature; it hung from his bones, it melted his features in the evening light. Hesitantly, he laid down the sword, and held out the beaker.
I took it, and set it on the floor. Then, standing, I crossed the small space between us and took his poor, misery-ridden face between my hands.
‘My dear man …’ I kissed the side of his cheek. ‘You are not made for this kind of despair. When we were children, you were a handful of sunshine, scattered among us. Where has it gone?’
‘They threatened to … harm you.’ He would not be more specific.
‘I know.’
‘You do?’ He pulled my hands from his face, held me at arm’s length. ‘How?’
Perhaps I could have told him that I’d had men following him who had listened to every word and brought the news straight to me, but I didn’t want to add to his paranoia. Maybe if I had things would have been different later, but they might have been differently worse, not better. Trabo is a soldier, he’s not built for subterfuge. We all used him and it was like using a spoon to cut meat; it might work after a fashion, and if it’s all you’ve got you make the best of it, but everything is damaged in the process.
So I let him hold me. We were close enough for me to see the fine veins threaded across the whites of his eyes, the lips that the beard didn’t quite hide, the arc of his brows. He had always been a handsome youth (my brother always fell for good-looking men) but for all my protestations of his sunny disposition there had ever been a rash, adolescent side to him that made him heady, prone to outbursts of righteous temper.
There, in that room in a seedy inn on the wrong side of the Tiber, what I held in my hands was a grown man in trouble, but a good one, and Rome was pitifully in want of good, grown men.
His eyes were locked on mine. I could feel the first stirrings of interest beneath his tunic, but he was too troubled, at first, to pay them heed. He said, ‘What can I do? Pantera told me to leave Rome and I’d barely walked three streets when Geminus was telling me to report to him. I can’t serve them both.’
‘Why not?’ I leaned my head on his shoulder. ‘You are offering Lucius an ear in the heart of Vespasian’s front line, or at least where the front line will be when Antonius Primus reaches Italy. Believe me, he’ll be glad enough of that.’
‘But if Pantera finds out, he’ll—’
‘Pantera understands.’ I took his hand, turned it over, kissed his palm. ‘You are too good a man to lose. That’s why he did what he did. He is doing his best to protect you, although I think we can do better.’ I folded his hand closed. ‘Do you want to leave Rome?’
‘What do you think?’ He was listening to his body now. For the first time that evening, I saw him smile. Sweat stood proud on his brow. I smoothed it away with my thumb. ‘Do I want to leave you? Am I crazy?’
‘I hope not.’ I pressed more tightly against him and turned my face up for his kiss.
He slid his arms round my waist, carefully, as if I were made of some fragile glass that might be easily crushed. I felt the weight of his elbows on my hips, the skin of his palms on the back of my neck, rough and ridged were he’d held a sword for days on end, and killed with it.
He was not killing now. For all his evident strength, there was a surprising delicacy to his touch as he lifted me up and laid me back on the bed. I drew him down on top of me, but later, when we had paused to slither out of our tunics, I pushed him down and lay on top of him and explored his body fully with my lips and hands before I let him enter me.
We slowed when dark came, and lit a candle and gentled each other by its light, as new lovers do, tracing the fall of shadows, the new curves and crannies that it created. ‘I’ve always wanted you,’ he said. ‘How did I not know it?’
‘The time wasn’t right.’ I traced round his nipple with the edge of one fingernail and watched it stiffen in response. ‘You don’t have to leave Rome, you know.’
‘I do. They’ll take you and—’
‘No, listen. You have to go out; they have to see you go, but if a bearded carter in the name of Hormus arrives with sealed messages for Lucillius Bassus at the naval base in Ravenna and that same man writes back detailed reports to both Pantera and Geminus, who is going to know they aren’t from you?’
He swallowed, tightly. His skin felt cold, suddenly, under my palms. ‘Where would I be instead?’ he asked.
‘You would be without your beard and with your hair less dark,’ I said. ‘If Gudrun at the Inn of the Crossed Spears can make Pantera into a Berber, I think we can find someone to turn you into a northman. You couldn’t be a carter any more, you couldn’t go back to the inn. You couldn’t risk being seen in Pantera’s company or mine. But Rome is a city of millions. There are places a man can hide if he chooses.’
I had been kissing his chest, nipping the hairs that grew there between my lips as I spoke. Then I looked up. His eyes shone rich with hope.
‘If I stayed, could I see you?’
‘I would like it if you did.’ I kissed him. It felt good. I corrected myself. ‘I would be heartbroken i
f you didn’t.’
We slept soon after that, and made love again when we woke, and by the time he went to find the horse that had been booked for him in the name of Hormus, we had a workable strategy planned.
Trabo had finished his letter to Geminus and had pressed on to the closing wax a small circle of wheel-binding wire that he had woven into his own makeshift seal, to prove that the letter was his. Geminus had its twin, to match against it in a rough but effective scheme dreamed up in the alley.
The seal was now in my possession, to give to a man loyal to me who would be well paid to take Trabo’s place on the trip up to Ravenna. I didn’t find it necessary to tell Trabo that the group would be ambushed and all the others killed and only Hormus would ‘escape’; as I said before, Trabo is a soldier, not made for subterfuge, and there are things we had to do to ensure his safety that he was better off not knowing.
That apart, we had a good result. Lucius thought he owned Trabo and Pantera thought that Lucius thought it while Pantera was the true owner. And I knew that Pantera thought so and was wrong: if anyone had rights over Trabo that September, it was me, and me alone.
Everyone thinks that it was Pantera’s actions that changed the course of this war and brought about what happened, and while on the larger scale that might be true it is also true that here in Rome, Trabo was the hub about which we all turned; his loyalty was the one thing we had all bought and none of us owned and in the end it was that – his loyalty – that we all needed.
PART IV
DOOMED SPIES
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Rome, October, AD 69
Geminus
OCTOBER BROUGHT US cold and rain and Lucius began to arrest anyone he even suspected of knowing Pantera and question them under duress.
Some of them, it turned out, did know him. There was a date-seller who, after two days of close attention, had revealed details of a hollow date that could be used to transmit messages. He had been too disfigured by then to send out on the streets to act as a decoy, and although we tried it with a substitute that trail ran cold.
There was an ostler who gave us little more, a slave who carried water; small people who told us small things and from those we learned that Pantera had been a small, wizened Berber, and then a tall Mauretanian merchant and was now neither.
He might well also have been an Ionian poet, a Dacian tanner, a British freedman – or perhaps he kept a Briton as a freedman, we were never clear – and a failed priest of Isis. The temples of Isis throughout the city maintained no knowledge of him and there were limits to even Lucius’ powers; none of the priests was brought in for questioning.
Lucius, therefore, was in a foul mood while I read him the steadily lengthening reports sent by Trabo from Ravenna and concluded that the hero of the legions was as fond of the pen as he was of the sword, which surprised me quite a bit.
‘Antonius Primus, legate in charge of the rebel legions, keeps to his camp in Verona. He has ordered that all the statues of Galba that were overturned be reinstated. The men of the VIIth Galbiana are pleased.’
‘Pantera sent a message to Lucillius Bassus yesterday telling him that Caecina was within a day’s march of Ravenna.’
‘Lucillius Bassus believes that Caecina may attack him in passing, and has put his men in readiness to fend off an assault. He has ten thousand marines at his beck, it being the winter season and the sea lanes closed.’
This last came early in the month and caused Lucius to send messengers on fast horses to warn Caecina so that he marched his men along a curving route away from the port to avoid any confrontation with the marines.
And then there was a gap of half a month with no reports at all and I feared that Trabo had been exposed and was even now in some small and bloodied room, being subjected to the same knives and hot irons and crushing devices as Lucius was using against Pantera’s suspected allies.
When, one day at the end of the month, a letter did finally arrive, it was twenty-six pages long, and even the first page tore the world apart.
‘Caecina has defected!’
I exploded into Lucius’ office, uninvited, unwelcome. I didn’t even stop to salute. ‘Of all the two-faced, insane, treacherous bastards … This is the man who got us through the mountains when everyone said it was impossible. He held us together after the mess at Cremona. He practically took the empire single-handed. What the fuck is he playing at?’
I looked up. Lucius was alone, which was a blessing, but only barely. He blinked and I came to my senses. I saw a crocodile once, when I was posted to Alexandria as a young man. They threw it a slave who had dropped a dinner plate in his master’s presence. I remember the screams sometimes, in my dreams. The crocodile had blinked as it watched them drag the wretch to the pool’s edge. Lucius’ blink was just like that.
He said, ‘Did his men defect with him?’
‘What? I mean, I don’t know. I didn’t read that far.’ I looked down at the letter.
To Geminus, centurion of the Guard, and to Juvens, greetings, from Quintus Aurelius Trabo, centurion of … et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The salutations took up a third of a page. For the rest …
‘Yes,’ I said, and then, ‘Actually, no. He tried to take them. He nearly succeeded, but they resisted and arrested him. Listen.’
I read aloud from the second page of the letter.
‘… the day before the full moon in October. The weather was cold, but dry thus far although there had been some distant thunder. Our enemy, Antonius Primus, was camped with his legions at Verona, having had word from Pantera ordering him to wait in Vespasian’s name.
‘Caecina, meanwhile, had stationed his thirty thousand men in an open space between the town of Hostilia and the river Po, his flanks defended by marshes. He was unassailable, but he was thirty miles from Verona, too far to reach it with any semblance of surprise. He had planned instead for defence in strength.
‘Soon after this, he received the unwelcome news that the Ravenna fleet had finally defected to Vespasian’s side. This was on the thirteenth of October. Caecina used this news as a reason to negotiate with Antonius Primus over the surrender of his men.’
I stopped, too angry to continue. But Lucius, he of the famous temper that could order a man’s limbs broken and his face held into a fire if he was in the right kind of filthy mood, said only, ‘What were his terms?’
And that’s when I realized it wasn’t news to him; he had sent Caecina out knowing that he was planning this, perhaps had even told him to. I just didn’t know why and I couldn’t ask. Sometimes, a sensible man doesn’t pry.
I read from the letter.
‘Caecina’s terms were poor. He stressed the folly of civil war and pointed out the strength of the men he planned to bring to Vespasian’s cause. He asked for nothing and offered everything. His letters were read out to the rebel troops by Antonius Primus, who jeered him. He did not once mention Vitellius, nor suggest our cause was just.
‘Antonius accepted the terms, and, on the morning of the eighteenth of October, when the men were out of camp on foraging duties, Caecina summoned the officers left in camp and proposed to them that they join him in taking their men to Vespasian’s side. By the morning’s end, they had all sworn their oaths anew to Vespasian and the portraits of Vitellius had been removed from the standards. The legions no longer owed him allegiance.
‘That situation prevailed until the men came back for the evening meal, and noticed that all sign of their emperor had gone. They quickly gathered, forced the details out of their officers and set about reversing the deal. These were the same men who had been victorious in the spring and they intended to be victorious now. They were certainly not going to give themselves to their enemy without a fight. They arrested Caecina and put him in chains— Ha! That’ll teach the motherfucking, goat-buggering bastard …’
I faltered. Lucius was beginning to look annoyed. I read on.
‘The loyal troops restored the images of Vitellius. A
ll was well until the following night, when the heavens displayed their wrath at Caecina’s treachery, for the moon became bloody, dripping red to the earth, and was swallowed by the night sky, so that the men fell to their knees and prayed that the power of the omen be on Caecina’s head and not theirs.’
‘That was the night of the eclipse,’ Lucius said. ‘The eighteenth of October. Nearly half a month has passed since then. Why has it taken so long for us to hear of this?’
‘I think Trabo followed the army, and was caught up in the fighting. Do you want me to keep reading?’
‘No. If I wanted someone to read me a book, I would call a clerk. Just tell me what it says.’
So I gave him the gist: that the new commanders of Caecina’s legions, seeing the eclipse as an omen – or, at least, telling the men that’s what it was – had struck camp before dawn, crossed the river Po and cut the bridge behind them to hinder any following force, then fast-marched their men to Cremona, where the rest of Caecina’s legions had been sent.
They had covered a hundred miles in five days, which may be nothing if you’re on horseback but when you’re moving a line of men two miles long it’s five days of hard marching with little rest in between.
They got there in time, but only just.
In the interim, Antonius Primus had heard of Caecina’s attempted defection and was rejoicing that he’d won the war without bloodshed as Vespasian wanted: he didn’t know that the defection had failed. It was two days before he learned that Caecina was under arrest and his men were still loyal to Vitellius.
At around the same time, Antonius heard that General Valens had finally left Rome and was intending to catch up with the men, take command and drive them in a wedge straight at Antonius Primus’ five legions.
What could any general do but respond swiftly? Antonius Primus gathered his men and marched them quickly along the Postumian Way towards Cremona.
